Depression Quotes

I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys? Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously.

~ Ruby Wax

It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a shower was inconceivable. What made it tolerable was while I was inside, I found my tribe - my people. They understood and unlike those who don't suffer, never get bored of you asking if it will ever go away? They can talk medication all hours, day and night; heaven to my ears.

~ Ruby Wax

Some might say that suicide is for cowards. I dare them to hold a razor to their wrists and say it as they slice into their own flesh.

~ Aubrey Dark

What was wrong with me? Why could I not just flip the switch and see all the brightness ahead if only I chose the correct path? Or rather, why could I see the correct path but not choose to tread upon it?

~ Hanne Arts

True friends never turn you away when all you need is someone to talk to. Ever. It's not the only thing that helps, but it's the only thing that works. Real friends never walk away, letting you slip deeper into the pit of despair.

~ Northern Adams

Avoidance therapy does not work. One major reason for that is because Avoidance Therapy (diversion, think yourself happy, positive affirmations) is predicated on the validity of 'Failure of Will.' Depression is not a choice.

~ Northern Adams

Caught in the center of a soundless fieldWhile hot inexplicable hours go byWhat trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?You seem to ask.I make a sharp reply,Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explainJust in what jaws you were to suppurate:You may have thought things would come right againIf you could only keep quite still and wait.

~ Philip Larkin

It's so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.

~ Ruby Wax

If, however, I am allowed to think that you and yours feel an interest in my fate and actions, it may be the means—it may put me on my guard—at least, it may be something to live for.

~ Jane Austen

Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being. She cleared her throat again. Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.

~ Aidan Chambers

It almost occurred; It almost got hold of my purity, Just as it headed for the war within my being,I fed it a light so bright; It thought it almost had control of me. Depression is just a dis-ease, So; Let your mind be free

~ Nikki Rowe

He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal.

~ Victor Hugo

A big part of dealing with depression is realizing that you are in control of your own happiness.

~ Brian Michael Good

Some of us will experience some form of mental illness in their lifetime... I rather have depression that can be treated with a pill and my free will to conquer it, than have a physical illness that results in my demise because no matter what I did I could not conquer it.

~ Brian Michael Good

It isn't discomfort, or dis-ease as he put it. It's this aching, throbbing, god-awful incurable pain - and it's known as life. When will the doctors learn: It isn't death that's the disease.

~ Wendy Law-Yone

I just wanna have fun and breathe, but I can’t do either one of them when I suffocate myself with depression.

~ Lisa M. Cronkhite

Leo and the Notmuch, the five-year old Leo Loses his best friend (is death for children like moving away?). For a whole summer he sits in his room and makes up stories. When his mother knocks and asks what he’s doing in his room, he answers: not much. Does his miss his friend? Not much, always: not much. Leo’s stories are the Notmuch (what kind of an idea is a Notmuch? It’s not nothing, at least). Leo and fips turned the world into a fun and exciting place. They stayed together through thick and thin. Leo is despondent without Fips, he hides away in his room. His mother gets worried and asks how he’s doing and what he’s up to in there. Not much, answers Leo, not much. He lies on the bed and grieves for Fips (a childlike depression). Then Leo begins to create a friend in his mind, a cheeky, brave, and honest friend like Fips. Leo dubs this “good monster” the notmuch (a childlike mania). Now the two of them play, they’re cheeky and brave together, Leo now answers his mother: Notmuch. The notmuch is half memory of Fips, the other half is imagination, the two halves together enable Leo to overcome grief.

~ Thomas Pletzinger

From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge.

~ Al Álvarez

We can’t handle absence anymore, anything is better than the blankness; the quiet of nothingness. People fight to put images of love and hate – both equally nauseating – between themselves and the blank space that surrounds us. It’s the only escape, and yet we feel the pressure of the blankness pressing in against us, forcing the violent display ever closer, forcing us to demand images brighter, more graphic until they scorch our senses badly enough that we no longer feel the void and the images become our reality. But it’s ok. Most people don’t need to fear absence anymore – we’re blinded, permanently. There’s no need to seek out the light show that protects us either; inoculation precedes the sickness now. Sedation isn’t an option, it’s a shared reality. Most people don’t see the beauty of the system, how perfect our salvation is.

~ Matthew Selwyn

Marianne had now been brought by degrees, so much into the habit of going out every day, that it was become a matter of indifference to her, whether she went or not: and she prepared quietly and mechanically for every evening's engagement, though without expecting the smallest amusement from any, and very often without knowing, till the last moment, where it was to take her.

~ Jane Austen

Can you admit on here that you have an affliction for millions of other people to see? Then that is great and a huge step towards your recovery.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

~ Norah Vincent

Negative thoughts are the causes of all depression and all stress.Be positive, never infect your mind with negative thoughts.

~ Debasish Mridha

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.

~ Norah Vincent

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

~ Sylvia Plath

Only the weak invite their demons to live with them. Isn't that right?

~ Maria V. Snyder

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.

~ Norah Vincent

I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings and future dreads, all similar, at least as far as my brain was concerned, and so, lumped together as one. But nobody can handle a lifetime of experience in one moment. That's why depression crushes you.

~ Norah Vincent

Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than it was to repeatedly try and fail. Failure-disappointment-was a poison in my blood. Despair was the antidote.

~ Norah Vincent

The industrial and technological revolutions have made our lives simpler, in terms of what is physically required of us on a daily basis, but they have also made it possible for us to do a whole lot less than we ought to be doing, and we suffer for it.We have become flabby and overweight; our joints and muscles have become stiff from lack of use. We suffer from all sorts of problems related to our lack of physical exercise; it affects us on all levels, causing high blood pressure, increased cholesterol, anxiety, depression, insomnia and the list goes on and on.We know, too, how much better we feel for a bit of exercise. Those “feel-good” hormones lift our spirits, boost self-esteem and improve our overall sense of well-being. It’s a sort of built-in reward system. There’s a reason for that. It’s because we are meant to be active.

~ Liberty Forrest

Happiness is not a reward. It's a consequence. You have to work at it every day.

~ Norah Vincent

He who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time--he is a child.

~ Jens Bjørneboe

An observant friend will recognize the signs of the rise of grief: eyes that easily well with tears, a smile that is difficult to sustain, a tendency to withdraw. And ultimately, perhaps we each need to create our own symbol of grieving — to wear our version of black, or maybe to color with black crayons for a while.

~ Sandy Oshiro Rosen

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.

~ John Green

None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away. The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume my job hunt; it was all I could do to drag myself from the bedroom floor to the sofa. With every passing day my financial affairs grew more ruinous, and it became harder and harder even to conceive of how I might dig myself out of the hole I was in—which only compounded my ennui, and my disinclination to do anything about it.

~ Paul Murray

Behind the shadows there lies defeat, Fancy the light where her smile greets.

~ Jackie Connors

Even when the sun was shining she couldn’t see it. The whole house was closing in on her and she was suffocating.

~ Crissi Langwell

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time

~ John Green

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.

~ John Green

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

~ Anne Sexton